Special Feature

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At the 2010 DSI Annual Meeting (November 19-22, 2010) in San Diego, California, Professor Wickham Skinner discussed the state of the discipline of decision sciences and the contribution made to it by the Decision Sciences Institute. His presentation is reproduced below. [Krishna Dhir, Editor]

Decision Sciences and the Decision Sciences Institute

by Wickham Skinner, Emeritus Professor, Harvard Business School

Earlier this year several DSI leaders expressed to me their sense that DSI and the decision sciences (DS) profession were somehow bogging down, lacking previous excitement and a sense of progress, and probably would benefit from carefully considered change. They asked me to give the plenary address at the 2010 conference in San Diego and offer my thoughts on sustaining the health and vitality of this important profession.

This is obviously a large and difficult task. I will deliver my remarks now without apologies but feeling the humility appropriate to one person attempting to understand a very substantial and complex set of facts and inferences. I recommend that my contributions become the beginning of a debate about your profession for I see it as at a promising but critical juncture in its place in the powerful saga of human decision making.

To try to gain some understanding of the roles and contributions of the DS and its professionals, I have asked for and received responses to written questions from 12 well-known and respected leaders in the DS profession; I studied certain demographics of the DSI, reviewed the last six issues of the Decision Sciences journal and from its editors acquired relevant statistics of its activities, obtained an overview of the knowledge base and its historical changes from reviewing some classic books in the field, and held phone interviews with a number of present day leaders in the DS academia.

Broadly, I have concluded the following points:
The DS has had near spectacular success over 60 years in developing useful mathematically based concepts and techniques (C&T) which have permeated every functional area of management in virtually every kind of organization, business, public, and non-profit. The results from the use of these methodologies are notable in industrial productivity gains, better organizational and institutional performance, and an element of deliberate rationality latent in management processes. The pervasive use of DS techniques has literally altered forever the vast universe of management and scientific decision making.

Following a half century of remarkable progress and success has come an apparent leveling off in the rate of the creation of breakthrough new C&Ts. Some feel this deceleration is inevitable, like depleting an oil well, or that new ideas become more scarce with the maturing of a research field.

Others counter the oil well analogy by providing examples of current interesting work which goes beyond the constraints of elementary, doable problems susceptible to resolution by textbook DS C&T's. This research centers on learning how to handle the multi-variant, "fuzzy" and "messy" and often behavioral decisions, which of course actually comprise much of the "real world."

All but one of my panel of academic leaders concluded that no more than 10 percent of the articles published these days in the DS journal are relevant and broadly useful to decision makers.

It was noted that a high proportion of present DS research output is analytical rather than empirical, accomplishing modest improvements in C&Ts, but contributing very little relative to the massive needs of managers and policy makers of the real world. In contrast to this low level of contribution it is clear from this country's economic, political, health cost, manufacturing and education problems (to name but a few troubling areas), that the need for better, wiser, and more rational decisions has never been greater. We could certainly contribute more to solving major problems of the day.

Putting all this together, it is apparent that DS and DSI as a profession with the mission of providing a public service has been enormously successful. Yet this same profession, perhaps largely due to its past successes in methodologies which are so common and so permeate the world that they are nearly commodities, now faces the question of what's next? Where do we go from here? We have done well. How can we do better?

Some argue that our people, who are 90 percent academics, are uniformly driven by the incentives and constraints for "rigor" in the academic world which have and will limit their research and writing to a level of triviality frequently useless in the real world.

This presents a dilemma of strategic importance: Given the constraints of our present training and prevalent system of academic incentives, how can we increase our contribution to this very troubled national and global world? What should be our mission? Our resource base? Our ways of working? Our strategies for becoming a more useful profession?

I conclude that when led by example from some of our outstanding leaders we can become more useful by shifting our predominant inward focus on the development and applications of DS techniques toward an outward focus on major problems of the day and their solutions.

I will offer evidence supporting these notions by reviewing the historical development of DS, evaluating the current performance results of the profession, observing the constraints embedded in the incentives of academia presently diverting the profession, suggesting that the current situation is a classic strategic dilemma, and conclude by offering some suggestions as to where and how the DSI might go from here.

The Spectacularly Successful History of the Development and Assimilation of the Decision Sciences

Our body of knowledge is founded upon the hard-scrabble, frequently unpopular and scorned achievements of a small number of men and women upon who doggedly persisted in trying to find ways of making management more effective.

Perhaps it all started with Watt's practical, industrial use of the steam engine in 1764 which made possible large, powered factories. In 1776 Adam Smith described a pin factory using production tooling for making pins which provided the benefits of a division of labor. Charles Babbage in 1832 wrote about how production should be organized and invented a computer using toothed gears. Following the pioneering efforts of Ely Whitney, Isaac Singer, and Cyrus McCormick, Frederick Taylor then began the systematic planning and numerical analysis of factories which became known as "scientific management."

In 1913 Henry Ford organized production with assembly lines. It was FW Harris who first described how an operation could be systematically modeled to predict and improve its performance. By 1931 Walter Shewhart demonstrated the first application of production scheduling and controls, and in 1935 LHC Tippet applied sampling theory to work measurement.

While the achievements of these intellectual leaders were often little noted by the public, one by one they demonstrated a growing awareness among managers of the powerful notion that major improvements in productivity and quality could be achieved using quantitatively based planning processes, measurement, and controls of production.

World War II placed new stress upon production systems and spawned the development of a flood of new concepts and techniques for improving productivity and expanding output. Following the war was a further burst of new techniques starting with time and motion studies, work measurement, and statistical controls of quality led, respectively, by the Gilbreths, Gantt, and Deming.

Operations Research came on fast with a widely read 1953 book Design for Decision, by Irwin Bross. And the great pioneers of that whirlwind era in the 50's and 60's included among other heroes: Starr, Forrester, Simon, Morgenstern, Muth, Bowman, von Neumann, Raiffa and Schlaiffer, Wald, Dantzig.

Using calculus for optimization, linear programming, modeling, simulation, game theory, decision theory, value analysis, Monte Carlo analysis, work sampling, waiting line theory, PERT/CPM—the theoretical concepts and application techniques then came out thick and fast, exploding with one after another for 50-plus years.

In one sense these were the glory years, times of excitement and discovery, and the establishment of new courses and new departments in the business schools and, indeed, in many forward-looking companies and government bureaus. They carried the excitement and prestige of experimenting and invention. Their leaders were a kind of heroes, magicians, mysterious in dealing with forms of analysis little understood, especially, as I was, those on the outside looking in.

In the b-school industry I vividly recall that these were times of widespread internal discord. Encountering such radical change in management ideas led by the pioneers, who though relatively few in number were bursting with successful innovations, threatened conventional academics who not surprisingly became critics. Joined by like-minded others they launched counter attacks in curriculum and evaluation committees affecting promotions and tenure. The attacks criticized the new DS approaches as being merely theoretical, too impractical, limited, and simplistic to be of much use.

Faculties slipped into a zero sum mentality, winner take all. In many schools, morale and faculty collegiality suffered. I saw this happen at my school.

In my personal experience these kinds of internal warfare were most common between about 1965 and 1975. But by 1975 things had quieted down. DS had earned acceptance in business and so became pretty well established in academia. Mutual respect gradually was restored, generally led by deans who made it clear that a wide variety of approaches to decision making were not only to be tolerated and respected, but, in fact, had come to understand their very variety coupled with high-quality research and teaching had become essential to every good school of business.

But looking back, we had seen the struggles of immigrants, so to speak, who had to fight their way into an inimical society where they were viewed with suspicion and accepted only begrudgingly until time and their performance earned them the credibility to become full citizens.

So I see many of these pioneers in DS as zealots, generally having had to fight harder and work harder than those in well-established and accepted conventional disciplines. They had the fun of invention, of creating, and the satisfaction of proving their worth. But many followers of these brilliant leaders had hard times and fought unpopular, uphill battles for acceptance and promotions. There were failures and personal tragedies along the way.

It had taken a long, slow time to prove that they offered more than slick algorithms and that their products were actually practical and useful.

When they proved they could contribute and that their skills should be taught to students, they finally became legitimate. Ultimately their success became undeniable and even spectacular, for it was a paradigm shift, a whole-cloth change in the cultures of business school faculties, who became teachers of a new way of making better decisions. Now as we stand on their shoulders, I look back in admiration and gratitude.

The Current Performance and Contributions of the Decision Sciences

Drawing on the observations and opinions of a dozen well-known leaders in DS, data from and about the DS journal, DSI demographics, and interviews across the profession, let me offer the following thoughts concerning the current situation.

As creating whole new C&Ts has apparently became more difficult, the emphasis of scholars has shifted to improving, extending, and optimizing existing methodologies.

Subsequently, many academics, consultants, and organization staffs placed their attention on specific DS applications, such as Materials Requirements Planning, modeling of complex systems, Total Quality Control, dynamic programming, and more recently on supply chain management, to list but a few. Applications are most prominent in Production and Operations Management, Management of Information Systems, Service Operations, and logistics. Less publicized but equally important are applications in finance, marketing, biology, medicine and health systems, environmental policy, and government bureaus.

DSI members, 90 percent academics, may be teaching DS tool courses or their teaching may focus on applying the tools in the functional areas such as of POM, IT, MIS, finance, marketing, or Service Ops. Spread over many such functional areas, their common bond is simply an interest and competence in quantitative, mathematical techniques to aid decision makers.

Eighty-eight percent of the DSI membership indicated their functional or research focus. They list 20 such areas and three (Operations, MIS, and Academic Administration) account for 33 percent of the total of 1621 members, or 535. The balance of members is spread over 17 different functional areas, averaging 64 members per functional area. This is diversity with a capital "D"!

As a result of this ubiquitous spread of applications, there is widespread confusion over "just what is the DS profession?" The academics teach the methodology, the operations people in the various functional areas apply the techniques, the consultants spread the word and sell the analytical systems wherever they can, while geeks and a few geniuses continue their efforts to create new concepts. All those so involved are generally considered to make up the "DS profession."

Some of my respondents felt that confusion over the definitions and activities of the profession is harmful to its success. They asked "What are the profession's important descriptors? What creates its bonds?" Several even asked "Is there a DS profession?" They argued that "professional schools usually produce professionals. Who do we produce?"

Concerning the earlier cited "sense of lethargy" or missing "the old excitement" in DS, by the nature of the question the evidence was inevitably elusive. What is clearly exciting to some of my leaders is the problem-solving efforts taking place in a variety of new applications everywhere in the universe of decision making. POM is new because it's changing via DS, and, similarly, so is IT, MIS, Service Ops, and finance. But unfortunately, according to the statistics from the DS journal, publishing broad, relevant, useful articles is apparently not what most DS people are doing.

The input and output of the journal is noteworthy. In 2007 the DS journal received about 450 articles, rejected 378, and published 72. The volume of the input is equivalent to one article a year for every four DSI members (of course, nonmember writers also submitted articles.) But if, as my panel judged (see below) the production of relevant and useful-to-practitioner articles is about 1/10, we have a membership of 1842 producing only seven useful" articles per year. These statistics are hardly air-tight, but even if they were 100 percent in error, they illuminate a big effort producing only a tiny quiet bang.

Of the 450 submissions, 252 (56%) focused on "primary methodological areas" rather than empirical studies.

As cited above, the DS leaders to whom I sent my questionnaire responded with 90 percent unanimity that only about 10 percent of DS journal articles were relevant, broad, useful, and readable to decision-makers. Another 30 percent were considered "of interest only to a major subsection of decision scientists." Sixty percent were not of interest to other than scattered decision scientists. If these judgments are anywhere near correct, decision scientists are mostly writing to each other.

DSI membership peaked in 1991, held level for eight years until 1999, and in the last 11 years has declined 42 percent, more or less steadily at 4 percent per year.

Many pieces of the above data lead me to a sense of concern that DS is missing the opportunity and falling short of its potential and missing opportunities to contribute more fully to our society. The tendency to publish mostly to each other and receive peer approval rather than communicating to practitioners stands out as a particularly negative signal. It is accompanied by a steady decline in membership. This suggests that certain of the strategies implicit in the practices and output of DS profession today are not working out well. There is work to be done.

But we need to acknowledge the incentives which have gradually driven DS away from steadily contributing to better decision making in the real world. DSI comprises 89 percent academics. Academic incentives are powerful, nearly universal, and seemingly set in concrete. The operative incentives hinge upon the usual publishing weighted criteria for promotion and tenure. Faculty publishing is generally expected to be academically rigorous, that is, it is to be expressing undeniable truth.

Conventional academic rules of the game are not to be fought, at least not today, and certainly not head on by junior faculty. But how to change the academic system of incentives which seem to be driving this profession into its own shell is not within the scope of this paper. Let it be.

Nontenured faculty are the slaves in this society, and my advice to them would be to play the game and get it over with. And learning a little rigor never hurt anybody (as long as it does not become a life-long constriction). But get promoted, for this is the doorway to freedom. The tragedy in my experience is that after seven years of being programmed to survive and achieve tenure, too many tenured professors somehow seem to have become so tarred with the skills of surviving that they never go through that gate to freedom which they have opened for themselves. They continue to elect their peers to be their judges.

Yet it is surely the tenured professors and their deans who must become the key players in improving the contribution of DS. So here in my mind is the crux of the DS dilemma: How to change the direction of the output from inward to outward within a system which drives it inward?

Wanted: Leaders Who Become Obsessed with Solving the Large Problems of Society

Let me propose DSI examine the reason for the on-going existence of DS. Is it not to help decision makers make better decisions? If so, then performance would be evaluated on the usefulness of the products and the extent of their transfer to users. What I seem to see, however, are incentives driving DS researchers to write to each other with only marginal contributions to the real world. To return to earlier successes and become a more useful profession calls for substantial change of strategic proportions.

It is a question of leadership. Leaders in the profession can bring about a change in institutional strategy by redefining the mission, objectives, processes, and practices of DS through DSI. A vision of teams working to solve the major problems of the day could be a powerful incentive.

We are immersed in an environment of change with a high density of big, serious, varied and widely dispersed societal problems. These challenges are everywhere; they are in the air we breathe and the economy in which we are trying to survive.

To illustrate, here are just a handful of such issues:

1. 10-year decline in the standards of living in the U.S.
2. Rising negative balance of trade
3. Climate change
4. Weak public schools
5. Engineering and research moving offshore
6. Federal deficits
7. How to continue the remarkable increase in the volume of U.S. manufacturing
8. Apparent reluctance and disinterest in our working population for working in factories
9. Dealing with terrorism
10. Growing shortages of oil, food, and water.

Vision, Mission, and Strategy for DS and DSI

To me, DSI's present mission of "advancing knowledge and improving instruction in all business and related disciplines" is uselessly vague. How about a mission which emphasizes maximizing DS contributions to society?

Let me set forth an hypothesis that the very success of the DS profession has led it to a level of maturity that, while generally comfortable and satisfying to many academics, is not fulfilling its potential for contributing to a crisis saturated world society. What would be a revitalizing new vision and mission?

Could a new strategy for DSI be for DS academic leadership to provide incentives and infrastructure for its members to break out of the conventional constraints of the academic world and go to work on some of these massive, critical problems? Could such a vision lead to a revised and revitalized mission? And revitalized, more exciting work? And careers?

Once again, let the debate begin.

The new vision would be to broaden and shift a significant proportion of the work of this profession away from inventing and improving the concepts and techniques of DS towards initiating and supporting teams from the membership to become the best worldwide solvers of major problems.

As an elder and a life-long compulsive revolutionary, I would love to see you leaders never resting until you are leading attacks on major problems of the day. Form DSI teams across departmental and university and institutional fences. You are loaded with talent; you have at your disposal the latest and best tools in the DS arsenal which give you major competitive advantages in the difficult problem solving ahead.

You may succeed or you may fail, but at least you will never need to say "I just sat around" when the world had work to do.

This remarkable institution, the Decision Sciences Institute, and your extraordinary Decision Sciences have been spectacularly successful. You have literally changed much of how the world goes about its work.

Let the show go on.

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